Since the late 1970s, Roni Horn has developed an expansive body of work encompassing drawing, photography, sculpture, installation, and text. Discrete and multifaceted, her works are unified by an abiding conceptual focus on questions of perception and the changeability of identity. Post Work III (1986–87), on view here, exemplifies Horn’s early exploration of the limits of our experience of the physical reality of sculptures—their forms, materiality, and presence—through her nuanced, precisely considered spatial compositions.

During the 1980s, Horn spent an intense period probing the qualities and potential of heavy metals, including cast iron and lead, by manipulating their material properties. Propped against the wall in Post Work III, six vertical rods are topped with squared-off weights. The work employs the technique of iron casting, which reveals the metal’s texture and arbitrariness of behavior, and highlights both its density and malleability. The mutable nature of the material alludes to the artist’s enduring exploration of the fluidity and contingency of identity. In its deceptively simple form, Horn’s sculpture demands a heightened attention, enabling us to discern the complex conditions of objects as shaped by the varying circumstances of each viewer’s encounter with the work.

Doubling is a recurring motif in Horn’s practice, where elements are paired and define their identity through differences in their similarities, as well as through their proximity to or distance from each other in varied positions. Horn’s interest in uncanny duplication extends to multiplication in Post Work III, rejecting the possibility of being experienced as a single, isolated element. Seemingly identical yet subtly distinct in their top forms, the six units in this work establish diverse relationships among themselves. Sharpened at the bottom, the vertical rods direct the viewer’s attention upward, where the weighty tops appear precariously balanced against the wall. These conditions are fully activated only in the viewer’s presence. Together, informing one another, the elements allow what the artist describes as “recognition, meaning, [and] identity to gather.”

—Donna De Salvo and Min Sun Jeon

Post Work III, 1986–87
Cast iron, 6 parts
Dia Art Foundation

Roni Horn was born in New York in 1955. Her practice spans a range of media, including drawing, sculpture, photography, installation, and text. She received a BFA from Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1975, and an MFA from Yale University, New Haven, in 1978. Since her first solo show at the Kunstraum in Munich in 1980, Horn’s work has been the subject of numerous exhibitions, such as Roni Horn aka Roni Horn, Tate Modern, London (2009), and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2009–10); Roni Horn: When I Breathe, I Draw, Menil Drawing Institute, Houston (2019); and Roni Horn: Give Me Paradox or Give Me Death, Museum Ludwig, Cologne (2024). Horn’s work has been included in major group exhibitions such as Documenta IX, Kassel (1992), and the Venice Biennale (1997 and 2003), among others. Horn’s first presentation with Dia, Roni Horn: Part I and Part II, was on view at Dia Center for the Arts, New York, from 2001 to 2002. Horn lives in New York.